Andrés Carrizo was born in Panama City, Panama, in 1982. The son of a professional Jazz arranger and musician, Carrizo grew up surrounded by music and performance. While a student at Williams College, he began studying composition in 2001, under the tutelage of Ileana Perez-Velazquez and David Kechley. After graduating with a B.A. in History and Music (with Honors in Music Composition), he moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied composition privately with Argentine pianist and composer Gerardo Gandini. In March 2014, Carrizo completed his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. His teachers included Shulamit Ran, Marta Ptaszynska, and Augusta Read Thomas. He is also an avid curator and producer: in 2013, he founded the MusicArte Contemporary Music Festival in Panama City, Panama. He is the Artistic Director of the Méndez/Carrizo Orchestra, a polystylistic group of musicians dedicated to performing original arrangements inspired by the Third Stream.
Carrizo and his family moved to the Colorado Springs area in 2020. He’s worked as a Lecturer at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS), is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College, and is the pianist and co-composer of the new music ensemble SonLingua. As musicians, the members of SonLingua are driven by a fascination with the human voice, the sounds of our landscape, and the confluence of electronic and acoustic music. In 2021, the quartet performed their debut concert, Fertile Words. The concert included the premiere of three new movements written in collaboration with Mikeas Sánchez (Zoque, México) and Sabino Esteban Francisco (q’anjob’al Maya, Guatemala), two indigenous American poets.
Carrizo’s music has been performed by Callithumpian Consort, the DePaul University Wind Ensemble, the Knights Templar Wind Ensemble (Portugal), the Interlochen Symphony Orchestra, the Panamanian National Symphony Orchestra, the Pacifica String Quartet, eighth blackbird, and Ensemble Dal Niente, among others.
